Things you didn’t know VLC media player can do

For most people, VLC is the favorite media player because it plays everything they throw at it without hiccups. No hunting for codec. But VLC can do a lot of other things as well. Find out how many of these listed below you knew, and how many you did not.

1. Rip DVDs: VLC includes a basic DVD ripper. You probably would never use it when there are better DVD rippers available, but it helps to know that you can in fact, get a decent quality DVD rip with VLC. To rip a movie follow these steps:

IObit Advanced SystemCare PRO Free Giveaway

IObit is giving away their popular system maintenance software Advanced System Care PRO free as a part of limited time giveaway to commemorate their 5th anniversary of Advanced System Care.

Foobar2000 - best alternative to Winamp

For those who are still sticking around Winamp  (or any other media player for that matter) to play their audio files should seriously have a look at Foobar2000. "Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats."

Auslogics Disk Defrag

Disk defragmentation has become an important procedure in computer maintenance. It not only optimizes how data is stored on the hard disk, but it increases overall performance of the computer by making it faster.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is one of the tools that has recently been acclaimed by many expert sites and individuals. It does its work very efficiently and its completely free for home users! And surely, it's a much faster and better alternative for the default Windows Disk Defragmenter.

Opera 10.50 final release available for download

Opera has finally come up with their stable Opera 10.5 browser after weeks of beta testing. It promises a lot of improvements over its predecessor and is supposed to be blazingly fast. Infact, many experts are already claiming the latest Opera to be faster than both Firefox and Chrome. Seems like there's stiff competition brewing up there.

Key features:

Changing the default save format in Microsoft Office 2007 appplications

Microsoft(MS) Office is one widely used office applications around the computing world. With MS Office 2007, the file formats of its applications changed. That is, for eg, powerpoint files were earlier saved as .ppt format while it became .pptx now. Similar with other office applications whose file formats changed with the new version.

It's a common notion that latest is always better but in this case it was not so. People who had saved their office files in latest 2007 format found their files incompatible in computers running 2003 office applications. Thus, it put many a people under inconvenience. So it is better to use the 2003 office file formats till everyone is familiar with 2007. While saving, we may select 'save as' and then select 'type' as 2003 file format(ppt, doc etc) and click on OK. That will work but many of us are careless to remember doing that all the time, or worse still, many new users don't even know about selecting the type and all that stuff. So it's better to keep 2003 file format as default rather than the 2007 one.

I will show an example using MS Word 2007. I will change the format from docx to doc. The images below show step by step procedure.

Changing colour scheme of Microsoft Office 2007 applications

 2007Many people have been asking me frequently how to change the colour scheme of MicroSoft(MS) Office applications. By default it is silver in colour like the one shown below.

I have posted stuff using MS Office applications on various forums and many people have asked how did I make mine Black instead of the default silver(I think so). Actually it is very easy and no big trick is involved. Just that most people overlook the settings required to make the changes.

Auto Power On and Shut Down

There can be variety of reasons why we may need to shutdown and start the computer at certain times without the need to do it manually.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RC

I do some casual programming in c++ and vb.net and I use Visual Studio 2008 for it. Recently I wanted a copy of that software to install it on my home computer and found that the dvd had caught a lot of scratches and it won't install the software completely. I had heard weeks ago, that Microsoft (MS) had launched a new version of their Visual Studio software and that they were giving it out for free at the moment, but didn't pay much attention to it until now.

Optimizing Windows Registry

In my previous post, we saw how to backup and restore Windows registry easily by using ERUNT tool. In addition to backing up and restoration, the registry requires optimization too. Registry optimization keeps the registry hives healthy and increases overall performance. Just like we need to defragment our hard drive, registry too needs to be done the same. And NTREGOPT does that for you. NTREGOPT stands for NT Registry Optimizer and it works for Windows 7 and Vista too.

Backup Windows Registry

Anyone who has been working for sometime with computers having Windows as its operating system, will be knowing how important a Windows registry is.

How to install Windows from USB Drive

Does this picture say something? Are you one of those trying to install Windows from your flash drives but don't know exactly how to do? Or are you one of them who know a certain method but want to know which is one of the most efficient ways to do so?
If, at all, you belong to any of the above (others are equally welcome!), then this post is what you should definitely read up. More and more people these days are trying to leave the traditional way of booting into Windows setup using bootable CDs. It's more of a necessity because people with netbooks do not have an optical drive or may be a person's optical drive has gone kaput.

Install Windows XP

Until I come up with my short guide on making pendrives bootable, here is a quick tip on how to install Windows. Though am using Windows XP as an example, it can be applied to almost any version of Windows from 2000 and later. This guide is basically meant for both new, inexperienced users as well as those who know how to do it.

Unlocker alternative for x64 Windows - LockHunter

In our earlier posts we have seen about deleting undeletable files using Unlocker and also about deleting undeletable files manually using command prompt. Doing it manually is actually a hectic job and using Unlocker is fast and a sure shot way. But the problem is that Unlocker is only for the 32 bit platform and more and more users these days are moving to the 64 bit version of Windows. Thus, for them, there's another nifty tool named LockHunter that comes in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

Deleting undeletable files using Unlocker

Many a time we have come across a situation where we try to remove/delete, move a file or a folder and we get this message.

Sometimes it just says 'Cannot delete file: access denied,' or may be 'Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use'. Most of the times it is true that the file mite be being used and that's why this warning can be a boon to some people. But it also happens that even though it is 'really' not being used anywhere, these kinds of messages pop up and hamper our computer activity.

Remove Antivirus 2009

NO! This is not any new antivirus product in the market, in fact it's a problem caused by one 'supposed to be antivirus' of the same name. A lot of people, mostly novice users, are facing this problem of Antivirus2008, Antivirus 2009, Antivirus 2009 PRO or even Antivirus 2010. They are all from similar family and just have different names. What happens, is that all of a sudden the user sees a pop up saying that the computer contains a number of viruses and they are risking their computers. When they try to click on the Clean button, it tells the user to buy the software and clean their system.
See some examples below.

 

Optimizing Firefox

We have seen how to optimize Firefox to reduce Firefox memory usage the manual way and to speed up Firefox automatically using FireTune. There is one more nice little application that will optimize both Firefox as well as Firebird and is therefore named as Mozilla Optimizer.

This software is good enough to be used on latest Firefox. Just select your browser and the action you want to do and its done. Easy and quick!

Its made and maintained by the guys at www.computerbase.de
You can download it from their site. Alternatively you can also download it from the link given below

Click here to download

Incase you want to try FireTune, a similar software you can visit here

Speed up Firefox

We have already seen how to reduce Firefox memory usage in our previous post. That can indeed solve the memory hogging problem of Firefox, but it involves manually tweaking about:config settings and that can be quite a complicated job for a novice user. Also if you have noticed, that configuration page is similar to the windows registry and tweaking them wrong can certainly be bad for your browser. Therefore for faster and easy optimization of these settings to speed up Firefox, we have a small but efficient software named FireTune. The version we have here is FireTune v 1.2.0 and it works with all versions of Firefox.

 

Reduce firefox memory usage

Firefox has been gaining popularity by the day and it holds a considerable market share when it comes to the battle of the browsers. They key to Firefox's popularity is its speed, security, ease of use, and of course the ever useful add-ons. While Firefox has made tremendous improvements in terms of features, security and speed, it has repeatedly failed in addressing a major issue, that of memory leak.

Pop up blocking

Everyone of us has faced those often nasty new browser windows opening up automatically when surfing online at some point or the other. During the early days of the internet, surfing through the web was a peaceful journey. When the internet revolution really began, the marketing guys went online too. And guess what! Pop up adds became their nuke weapon.